Video Tutorial: How to Create Subclips Using the Favorite Option in Final Cut Pro X

Use the Favorite command in Final Cut Pro X to easily create subclips!

Final Cut Pro X doesn’t include a formal subclip option, but you can mimic subclipping by using the “Favorite” command.

Watch this video tutorial to find out how to create subclips in Final Cut Pro X!

This Final Cut Pro X video tutorial will teach you how to:

Use the Favorite command to section off footage that you’d like to use later

Work with favorited subclips in both List View and Thumbnail View

Use Final Cut Pro X filtering options to view your favorited subclips all together

“Delete” subclips

Full Video Transcription

Hello, this Ashley Kennedy with Premiumbeat.com, here to show you how to create subclips using the Favorite option in Final Cut Pro X. Now, Final Cut Pro X doesn’t actually include a feature called subclipping, but we can subclip using our Favorites option and I’m going to show you exactly how to do that. So I’ve got a couple of interviews here and I would like to subclip this out into the individual soundbites. I’m going to go ahead and just select this and go to List View and as we see here our Dale interview has the keywords from the keywords collection that it’s a part of, and what we’re going to do next is actually add Favorite options based on the individual soundbites. So let’s go ahead and start this at the beginning and get our first soundbite that we’d like to use for our show. I’m marking an In, where I want it to start. And I marked an Out, when I was finished. This part right here is the part I’d like to subclip. I think I might use that in my show, and I need to make this a Favorite. So I can either come down to my Favorite star or just press F- that’s what I would recommend since it is going to be a common activity.

Notice that when I pressed F I got my green line in this spot, and I also have a new piece of information underneath the Dale clip called Favorite. It shows my start and end time code and my duration, and what I’m going to do is actually just rename this, as if I was creating a subclip, I’m going to rename this, “Feel Good About Getting Out of Homelessness”. Just so you know, this now becomes searchable, so it’s good to be specific when you enter in your subclip data so that you can search for it later on. OK, so that’s making a subclip using the Favorites option, using in and out points. I’m going to go ahead and just create a couple of more subclips, and then we’ll take a look at how we can use them. OK. So I have three subclips. They’re labeled. You can see that they’re right here in the master clip. If I want to select one of these subclips I just click on the green line and that portion of the subclip is selected. I can also just select a subclip by clicking right here on the Favorites and you can see that these values are highlighted as well. If I want to only see my Favorites and just so you know I have a couple of Favorites under here for Joan as well, I’ll come back over to my thumbnail view and choose All Clips and then go Favorites. Here are my subclips from my interviews, that I can now edit into my timeline the same way that I would edit in a master clip.

Also, you should know that if you change your mind and don’t want to use one of these as a subclip you can’t just delete the clip, because while it looks like you removed this as one of your Favorites, what you’ve actually done is reject it. The delete key means reject. We can prove that by coming up to Rejected and you can see that this is now in the rejected pile. Instead of deleting a subclip you just press U to un-rate and then when we go back to All Clips. I’ll switch over to List View, you can see that this portion is no longer marked as a Favorite, but it’s not rejected either, OK? So if we change our mind we just go ahead and click on the green line and press U. You’ll notice that it disappears from here as well. And we have it available to us because it’s part of the master clip, but it disappears from our Favorite view.

I’m going to undo that because I do actually want those as Favorites and I’m going to change this back to a Favorite subclip. So that’s basically all there is to it. Instead of making separate subclips that you then have to organize in your bins like you do in Final Cut Pro 7, favoriting actually just organizes it underneath the master clip. That’s a really good way to sort of section out the parts of the clip that you’d like to use.

Thanks so much for watching. Check back often at PremiumBeat.com for exciting video tutorials in both Avid and Final Cut Pro. This is Ashley Kennedy with PremiumBeat.com.

If you call these subclips then every clip in your timeline is a subclip. They’re clips. Fcpx doesn’t do subclips in the fcp7 sense.

VanDaven

Is there a quicker (keyboard-based) way to immediately rename a favorite? Thanks.

Jacqui

Did you ever find this ?

Michael

With all due respect to Ashley (I like your tutorials), I have to disagree with promoting this method as subclipping.

Reason: In favorites view, you cannot see the names of the favorites without being in list mode. Changing the name of the clip in favorite view (or in filmstrip mode) changes the name of the entire clip. A subclip should exist as a separate instance of a portion of a clip.

After using favorites extensively on a documentary, I decided to stay away from using this method. I find it’s much better to use favorites for it’s literal purpose – setting something aside as better than the rest.

Currently my method for logging interviews is to make a keyword range with the word “answer” and then add any info into the log note. Another reason I don’t like over-favoriting is that it’s way too easy to delete them all by hitting the U key. With keywords, you have to hit cmd-del to get rid of them (or delete them from the keyword picker) – so, any mistakes there would be much less likely.

I hope to see true subclipping in a future version of FCP X. It would be quite helpful to have that back.